


A spell for summoning valuable things

by popliar (littlerhymes)



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dark Magic, Hala Hala (music video), M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Apocalypse, Say My Name (music video), Summoning, minor Hongjoong/Seonghwa, naming magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-26 18:51:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20935061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlerhymes/pseuds/popliar
Summary: "Let me out," the boy says, trapped inside the glass chamber - a boy who shouldn't be there, who has no reason to even exist. He presses his hands up to the glass. "Please," he says, eyes very wide, very plaintive. "Why won't you please let me out?"(a Say My Name/Hala Hala AU)





	A spell for summoning valuable things

**Author's Note:**

> thank you as always proteinscollide (for beta reading and for talking me into going to the ateez show, LOOK AT WHAT U DID) and greenet (most patient friend who barely knows one ateez from another lol)

It's quiet. Everyone is busy at their typewriters and stacks of paper, sorting through their cuttings and clippings and scraps (or trying to, at least - Hongjoong pretends not to see when Mingi throws a paper plane and it sticks in Yunho's hair), when San comes skidding into the workshop in a panic.

"Captain," he gasps, bent over with his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. "Captain, there's -" he points, breathless, back in the direction he came from. He shakes his head, gives up. "Come on," he says instead, grabbing Hongjoong's sleeve and tugging him up from his seat, and the other five are soon on their feet and following.

Hongjoong lets himself be led through the maze of corridors and chambers that make up the museum - some rooms piled high with rubble, some as pristine as they were the day that the world ended, others still turned into barracks and storerooms - to the central atrium with its clear ceiling, letting in the light of the poisoned skies. 

But Hongjoong doesn't spare the clouds or the sickly sun a glance, not this time. "Look," San says, needlessly, because they're already looking very very hard. "Look!"

"Let me out," the boy says, trapped inside the glass chamber, the boy who shouldn't be there, who has no reason to even exist. He presses his hands up to the glass. "Please," he says, eyes very wide, very plaintive. "Why won't you please let me out?"

"Hongjoong," Seonghwa says cautiously, "did you-"

"No," he says swiftly, shaking his head. "No. I didn't summon him." 

And then no one knows what to say.

"Shit," Jongho says, breaking the stunned silence. He draws his sword with a _schwing_. "So. Do we kill it?"

*

Seonghwa remembers his own summoning quite well. His memories begin with darkness, and then sound, then light. Then pain. It's not a pleasant memory. Even now, he can't listen to Hongjoong blowing the herald's trumpet without wincing. 

But afterwards, at the end of it all, he also remembers Hongjoong cradling him in his arms as he dragged him out of the chamber, saying over and over his name, his name, his name. 

"Seonghwa," Hongjoong said, urging him to sit by the fire and warm his frozen, rigid limbs.

"Seonghwa," he said, pushing him to eat a bowl of soup, to choke down a piece of wizened fruit. 

"Seonghwa," Hongjoong said, softly, when he was too frightened to close his eyes, terrified of the dark reclaiming him again, running his fingers through Seonghwa's hair until finally, exhausted, he slept. 

Back then, it was just the two of them. Alone in the echoing museum, utterly alone in the world. At least they'd had each other. Sometimes Seonghwa imagines what it must have been like for Hongjoong before, on his own, and that thought makes him almost unspeakably sad.

"What's this for?" Hongjoong said when Seonghwa hugged him from behind, puzzled but not displeased.

"No reason," Seonghwa said, and Hongjoong just shrugged and smiled and turned back to his typewriter, smile fading as he typed faster and faster.

Hongjoong worked every day, sometimes from dawn to dusk, barely stopping to eat. For hours he'd feverishly write, until the floor around the worktable was covered with snowdrifts of close-typed reams - half or more which would end up in the fire. On other days, Hongjoong would methodically go through stacks of printed material, magazines and reports and newspapers from before everyone disappeared, his eyes restlessly scanning them until he found the word, the phrase, that he needed and could snip it out to store safely with the others.

"Can't I help, even a little?" Seonghwa said at last, after another night he'd found Hongjoong falling asleep at the long bench. He'd had to shake him awake and lead him to bed, yawning and groggy. He reached out in the dark and touched Hongjoong's hand where it lay on top of the blankets. "What can I do?"

For a long time, Hongjoong said nothing. Then, with a small sigh, he said, "Tomorrow. We'll talk tomorrow." 

The next day, Hongjoong showed him two large folders, each full to bursting. "This is what I've been working on," he said.

Tentatively, Seonghwa flipped through a few pages - it seems to him to be nothing more than a haphazard compilation of words, lines, lyrics, phrases, diagrams, pictures, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. "What is it for?" 

"Who," Hongjoong said. "_Who_ is it for." He rests his hand on one folder. "This is for San." He places his hand on the other. "And this is for Wooyoung."

*

They don't kill the boy in the chamber.

"I promise, I don't want to hurt anyone," the boy says, hunkered down with his knees drawn up to his chest. He looks thin, and cold, and frightened. "I don't know where I am. I don't know what I'm doing here. Please."

"Alright. He's safe," Hongjoong pronounces at last. He pauses, reconsiders his words. "Well. As safe as anyone is," he says, shrugging. Seonghwa doesn't look too happy with that but Hongjoong is already opening the chamber door.

The boy stumbles out, almost falling. He must be parched, Hongjoong realises, probably starving. And cold, like they all are, when they're first summoned back into the world. He doesn't look dangerous. He doesn't look like he could harm a fly.

"Wooyoung," Hongjoong says. "Jongho."

Wooyoung straightens up expectantly. Jongho, sulky at having to sheathe his sword, still answers obediently enough. "Yes, Captain?" 

"Give him some food and water. Find him something warmer to wear." Hongjoong shoots Jongho a hard look. "And don't kill him."

Jongho lets out a long, put-upon sigh. "But Captain, you never let me kill anyone," he says, disappointed. It's an act, mostly, but the boy from the chamber isn't to know that, shrinking behind Wooyoung instinctively. 

"Oh, get going," Hongjoong says, waving them off. They head off into the corridors, Wooyoung already excitedly asking a dozen questions that the boy seems entirely ill-equipped to answer.

"Are you sure it's safe?" Seonghwa says quietly. He looks worried still, chewing on his lower lip.

"Well, I don't sense any harm in him," Hongjoong says, shrugging. "And Jongho's already terrified him half out of his wits."

"Sure," Seonghwa says. "But you can't explain him either. You don't know why or how he's here."

"No," he says. It's a somewhat bitter thing to admit. They rely on him, they look to him for leadership, and for the first time he has no answers. "No, I can't."

They both fall silent, looking at the now-empty chamber. Hongjoong takes a deep breath and closes the chamber again, and tries not to worry about what they might find in there tomorrow.

*

"So tell me again," San said, not because he didn't know but because he liked to hear it, "about how you summoned us." He propped his chin up on his hand and smiled a wide, innocent smile.

Seonghwa huffed, exasperated. "Again?"

"Why not?" San said. "I just wanna know what to do so I can get it right! I'm worried I'm gonna screw this up. Hyung, please." He pouted a little, and that did the trick.

"So the Captain and I," Seonghwa said, very patiently, for the tenth or twelfth or twentieth time, "we began by compiling your file..."

Wooyoung let the words wash over him, too busy trying to pull together a file of his own. He and San had been begging for the chance for ages, and finally Hongjoong had given in. Now, Wooyoung was kind of regretting it. 

San already had everything planned out for _his_ file. "It will be someone tall," he'd told Wooyoung the day before, "because I'm not tall and we'll make a good team. Someone who will laugh at my jokes, because I'm funny. Someone I can play games with, because seriously, it gets too boring around here sometimes."

"Hey," Wooyoung replied, mock-outraged, wrestling him to the ground, "how dare you call me boring!"

Soenghwa said he was working on a file for someone young and strong, someone with a steely, hardworking spirit. "But he will be cute, too," Seonghwa murmured, sorting through his piles of clippings. "Cute is important..."

Wooyoung didn't have a plan. He'd been sorting through papers all morning, hoping to find some inspiration. Instead all he had was ink-stained fingers from all the old newsprint. He sighed and put his head down on the table with a thump.

"No need to force it. Take a walk, Wooyoung," Seonghwa said, patting him on the shoulder. "And take this one with you."

San practically bounced out of his seat with excitement. "Oh! Can we go outside?" 

"Yes," Seonghwa said, "but be careful, and be back before dark."

They were careful. Brimmed hats and masks and boots to protect against the earth, the air, the water, the light. Talismans around their necks, rings on their fingers and in their ears, pinned into the fabric of their clothes, to ward off the things that couldn't be seen, couldn't be touched. 

"What do you think it was like, before?" San said, as they picked their way through another abandoned building. It had been a hotel once, and the vast, echoing marble lobby retained some of its former glamour, a crystal chandelier glittering above their heads, the wide windows looking out to the flat, grey sea. But dust lay thick on the counters and the upholstered furnishings; and the grand staircase that led up to the mezzanine had cracks running all up and down its length. "Before everything ended, I mean."

"There must have been so many people," Wooyoung said. He gestured to the size of the hotel. "I mean, look at this place." As they walked up the cracked stairs, he added, "I wish the Captain could tell us more." 

Going further up and further in, they found a vending machine that hadn't yet been plundered. They pried it open and filled up San's backpack with packets of sweets and snacks, some still good, some only slightly stale. 

Next they chose a room at random, number 323, and pushed their way inside. Here there was another find: a suitcase packed with clothes, a wardrobe filled with even more. 

"I want this," San said, seizing a soft ribbed sweater in cream and blue, and then joyfully grabbing a long tan coat. "Oh, and this one!" 

The clothes were mostly too large for Wooyoung, which was disappointing. But as he began sorting through them, starting to compose an outfit - a pair of black pants, this white tee with that gray patterned jacket, these furs and this leather belt - he found he had the start of a plan. 

"He'll be tall enough to wear these and broad enough to look good in them," Wooyoung said, carefully laying each item out on the bed. "His favourite snacks are those potato chips we just found. He'll speak softly but he can shout when he needs to. He has a compass, so he always knows how to find his way home."

They went back with their backpacks full of chips and candies and clothes, their heads full of ideas. Wooyoung worked on his file late into the night, and then the next night, and the next one too. Building the story of the one that Wooyoung wanted to summon, filling in the details of the life they might have led, describing the person they would be. 

Sometimes, Wooyoung thought he could almost picture their face.

When all three of them were ready, they brought their files to Hongjoong. He perused them carefully in turn, though it was only a last minute check for safety - he'd watched over each of them, guiding them in their work, and he knew the files as well as they did. 

Finally, when Hongjoong was satisfied, he sealed the spells and named them.

Of Seonghwa's file, he said, "This is Jongho." To San, he said, "This is Mingi." 

Finally, to Wooyoung, handing back the file with both hands, "This is Yunho."

"Yunho," Wooyoung said to himself, trying out the name on his tongue. "Yunho." It felt right. Sounded right. As though it had been the right name all along.

"Alright," Hongjoong said. He tilted his head towards the chamber. "Let's begin."

*

The boy says his name is Yeosang. 

"But who named you?" Hongjoong says, still utterly puzzled. "Who summoned you?"

"I don't know," Yeosang insists again, hunched up in the coat that San had found for him. "I just know my name is Yeosang, like I know my own birthday, like I know I like chocolate." He shrugs helplessly. "I don't understand what you're asking. I mean, how does anyone know these things?"

Hongjoong resists the urge to massage his temples. 

"What else do you remember?" Seonghwa says, trying a different tack. "Where were you and who was with you, before you woke up in that chamber?"

Yeosang starts to say something, then stops. "I'm not sure," he says softly, hesitantly. It's not _I don't know_. "I think I saw... I thought I heard..."

"What?" Hongjoong says, a little impatiently. 

"I think I saw you," Yeosang says at last, looking back at Hongjoong. "I thought I heard your voice, calling my name."

*

According to Wooyoung, Yunho had once been a file, a stack of papers, as tall as his hand was wide, until the Captain had transformed the papers into a man. 

"Well, not exactly," Wooyoung conceded. "It's more like, the file was a summoning spell that described who you were, who you were gonna be. Like a recipe, you know? But for a person." 

"So, you wrote the recipe, and the Captain was the cook," Yunho said, laughing, but trying very hard to understand. "What does that make me? The meal?"

"And wouldn't he love to just eat you up," San said slyly, shrieking when Wooyoung promptly pelted a pen at his head. 

"Don't _listen_ to him," Wooyoung said, going red all over. "San is full of lies!"

Yunho would've liked a look at his own file just to see what it said, but it wasn't possible, the file having been exchanged for Yunho's own person. All that remained of it was a few scraps of paper, on which the text had been transmogrified into his name, written over and over and over. 

"Keep this safe," Wooyoung had said on that very first day, carefully clipping all the bits of paper together and then pinning the bundle to his shirt. "Don't lose it." All of them wore their names in this way, tucked into their clothes somewhere. 

"What would happen if I did?" Yunho asked, curious. Would he disappear, or turn back into a pile of papers, or be un-summoned to wherever he came from? Or would he stay in this body and this form, but as a blank slate, a story untold?

"Just don't lose it," Hongjoong said quietly, from behind him, and that was the end of that. 

With Yunho and Mingi and Jongho, they were seven. It meant more mouths to feed and bodies to shelter, but there was strength in numbers too. Seonghwa drew up a roster for housekeeping tasks, the storerooms grew full with scavenged supplies, and at night they took shifts to keep watch against the darkness so the ones who slept could rest easier.

On his first watch, Yunho was paired up with Jongho. They climbed the stairs up to the roof where Seonghwa's plants had begun to sprout and grow (a little more slowly than he'd like because of the weakness of the sun, but a start nonetheless). All night they walked the parapets by the light of the moon, waiting and waiting for some unknown, unforeseen danger that never came. 

"Do you think there's really anything out there?" Yunho said at last, shivering as the first rays of light began to show on the horizon. "Or are we out here for nothing?"

Silently, Jongho showed him the brooch Seonghwa had pinned to his jacket hours before. It had been silver, then. Now, it was blackened and looked almost as if it had been melted - much like some of the artworks in the galleries below their feet. "Something passed by us in the night," Jongho said, uncharacteristically subdued. "Even if we didn't see it."

There must've been a reason, after all, for all the cities to be abandoned, for the entire world to be so empty.

Most often, Yunho was paired with Wooyoung, because San and Mingi were practically inseparable just as San had predicted, and Seonghwa liked to fuss over Jongho and Jongho liked pretending to be annoyed by it. Yunho didn't mind it. Liked it, in fact, when it was just him and Wooyoung working side by side, Wooyoung with his pretty smile and bright eyes and the way he looked at Yunho - _like he could eat you_, San whispered, in the back of Yunho's head.

They went down to the harbour one day, on Hongjoong's instructions. "Find me a place we can draw a summoning circle," he'd said. "A really large one. Right on the water." 

"What is the Captain expecting to summon?" Yunho said, after they'd found a good spot near the jetty and roughly marked out the boundaries with white pebbles. "A whale?"

"A ship, of course," Wooyoung said instantly. "Why else does he have us making maps all day? Sooner or later, we're leaving this place."

Hongjoong didn't have them compiling files about people anymore. Instead each of them was working on the imagined history of a made-up location, stories of deserts and palaces and tropical islands and distant cities, files stuffed with photos of destinations they've never seen, maps of places unknown to history. Sooner or later, Yunho supposed, Hongjoong would name those places and they, too, would come into being.

They kept walking along the shore, down to a quiet inlet where the water was more still and shallow. There they found, to their surprise, there were fish. "Do you think they're safe to eat?" Wooyoung said doubtfully, but hopefully. They were all growing sick of canned food and instant ramen.

"I don't think we can even catch them," Yunho said, but he lay down on his belly and put his hands into the water anyway. Yunho let his mind drift, let his hands grow cold and numb in the water. And then, when he felt something brush against his fingertips - 

"Got it," he yelled, throwing the fish onto the shore. Wooyoung screamed in surprise and Yunho screamed back and neither of them kept a hold on the fish, which promptly flopped its way back into the water and was lost forever more. 

"I didn't think you would really catch one," Wooyoung said, sounding slightly awed. "How did you know how to do that? Did Mingi or someone show you that trick?"

Yunho, dusting grass and dirt from his black clothes, answered absently. "No, it wasn't Mingi, I just," he stopped short and then said more slowly, "I feel like I might have done it once, a long time ago." He does remember. A lake overgrown with reeds, a child's laughter, bright sunlight. "Wasn't that - didn't you put that in my file?"

Wooyoung just shook his head. His eyes, above the mask, were very wide.

Back at the museum, Yunho slipped away and went to his room, planning to write down the day's events in his diary. 'His room' was just an office tucked away in a forgotten corner that no one else bothered visiting. He'd found it on one of his very first days and whenever he wanted time alone, he'd come back. No one seemed to mind; maybe they all did similar things themselves. The museum was large enough for each of them to have a dozen such places without anyone noticing. 

If Hongjoong's summonings were all imagined places, imagined people, of which Yunho himself was just another one - then Yunho's diary strove to be just the opposite, to be only about real places, real memories, a clear and truthful account of everything that had happened since he was brought into this world. 

But he chewed over his quill when it came to the matter of the fish. Was what he'd seen in his head real? Or was it imagined? The memory, if it was that, had felt so clear. The warmth of the sun on his back, the wriggling fish in his hand, an old man telling him how he needed to keep very, very still. Yunho wrote it all down anyway.

"Do you ever," he said to Mingi, the next day, when they were on laundry duty together, "do you ever have - memories?" 

"Memories?" Mingi said, wringing out a t-shirt with a grimace. "Of course I have memories, I remember you dumping me with the dishes after dinner last night and I'm still gonna get you back for that, just you wait -"

"Okay, okay, I already said I'm sorry about that," Yunho said quickly, secretly hoping Mingi forgot about it soon. "I mean, do you have memories of before. Memories that wouldn't have been in your file. Like. Memories of being a child."

Mingi was silent for a long time. Then he said, quietly, "Yes. At least. I think they're memories. I asked San about them and he's not sure." He hung the shirt up to dry and started on another. "I remember playing video games with someone. I think - I think it was my brother."

"We could ask the Captain," Yunho said, after scrubbing and rinsing another shirt clean and then tossing it over to Mingi to wring and dry. "Or Seonghwa."

"Maybe," Mingi said, but then he dropped his voice to a whisper, leaning in close to say it right into Yunho's ear. "But what if we're not meant to remember these? What if they take them away? Yunho, if it was really my brother, then I don't want to have to forget..."

Yunho thought back to the intense green of the trees by the lakeside, the old man's voice, the sun reflecting from the fish's scales. "No," he said reluctantly. "Me either."

*

"I think we were friends," Yeosang says, his voice gaining confidence. "Before everything. We knew each other well. Do you remember?"

"No," Hongjoong says, because it's true. He doesn't. He doesn't remember anything except that he'd woken alone in this ruined place, in this abandoned world, with the trumpet in one hand, a spell book in the other. "No, I don't remember."

"And it wasn't just you," Yeosang says, closing his eyes in concentration. "It's coming back to me now, there was Seonghwa-hyung too... And San... All eight of us, we were students together, some of us even lived together. There was a beach, and a skatepark, and -"

"You're lying," Hongjoong says, feeling a kind of choking panic rising up his throat. He stands up, nearly knocking his chair over. "You're lying. How can you remember them when I made them up, when I summoned Seonghwa myself, when I wrote and stitched together and invented _his entire history_ -"

Beside him, Seonghwa took in a deep, sharp breath.

"What if you didn't make him up?" Yeosang says, opening his eyes, tilting his head to one side. He doesn't look frightened at all now. "What if you were just remembering him?"

*

"You like him, don't you?" San said, leaning hard into Wooyoung's side as he scowled at his typewriter. They were alone in the workshop, the others all busy elsewhere. 

"I like everyone," Wooyoung said, refusing to take the bait, typing away even though the words were mostly coming out nonsense. "You'll have to be more specific."

"You like Yunho," San said smugly, slinging his arm around Wooyoung's shoulders. San, his best friend San, his annoying friend San, who knew him as well as he knew himself. "You want to climb him like a tree."

"Okay, that's it, you're dead." Wooyoung stopped typing abruptly and San scrambled off the bench, giggling and already starting to run. Wooyoung gave chase, the two of them pelting down the corridor and nearly knocking down Mingi, into the room they'd converted into barracks, only stopping when Wooyoung tackled San onto his bed. 

"You do like him, you do like him," San chanted triumphantly, twisting and wriggling and dodging Wooyoung's slaps until somehow he'd flipped them over and he was the one pinning Wooyoung down. "Don't worry," he said, leaning down and whispering into Wooyoung's ear, "because I know he likes you too."

Then San was gone, fast as lightning, and Wooyoung was left alone to think about what he'd just heard, his stomach tied up in knots. He hoped, god, how he hoped it wasn't true. 

But it didn't stop him from spending more time with Yunho, trying to make him laugh, wanting more and more of his attention... 

One night he even wheedled Yunho into taking him to his little hidey hole. "Please, please, please," he said. "I'm not above pouting, you know."

"Fine," Yunho said, giving in, looking a little flustered. It looked good on him.

It must've once been a professor's office, still full of archaic treasures. It gave Wooyoung a thrill to think he was the only one that Yunho had brought here, the only person who'd seen his secret place. Wooyoung flipped through the musty old books, shook the hourglass, spun the globe of the world, only realising when he heard Yunho's little snort that he must've looked just like a restless child, fiddling with and touching everything in sight.

"Sorry," Wooyoung said, putting down the antique telephone and quickly putting his hands behind his back. "I'm making a mess of your room, aren't I?"

"It's fine," Yunho said, laughing, looking at him with such fondness. "You can touch whatever you want in here. Anything at all."

Wooyoung came over to lean against the edge of his desk. "Oh? Anything?" he said, in teasing voice. It'd be flirting if it was with anyone except Yunho, who didn't like him like that, who couldn't - Wooyoung refused to believe San was right. 

Except then Yunho was standing over him, his arms caging him in against the desk, Yunho's face so very close to his. "Anything," Yunho said, and waited.

Wooyoung could've pushed him aside easily. Could've ducked under Yunho's arm and run. Instead he'd tilted his head up and closed his eyes and let Yunho kiss him, and then kissed him back.

It wasn't until Yunho was standing between his legs, and Yunho's hands were on his hips, and there was the faint clunking of items being slowly pushed off the table behind him that Wooyoung finally came to his senses. 

"Stop," he said, pushing at Yunho's chest. Yunho stopped, took a step back. "You don't really want this," Wooyoung said, getting off the table and standing with unsteady legs. "I know you don't."

"But I do," Yunho said slowly, looking confused and upset. "Why would you say that?"

"Remember, I wrote your words!" Wooyoung said. He'd been over it so many times in his head, he almost shouted them aloud. "I made up your story. You _think_ you want this, but you don't - not really. All it means is I fucked up your file."

San had teased him when he was putting his file together, laughing at the contents. _Wow, this kinda reads like you're trying to summon a boyfriend_. Wooyoung told him to shut up and mind his own business, but as usual San had been right. Somewhere along the way, he'd let his own wants creep into the spell, tainted what should've been good, should've been pure.

"Just because you wrote my story..." Yunho shook his head, starting to look less upset and more angry. "Do you honestly think that's all I am? You don't believe I can make up my own mind or have my own feelings about this? Or about anything?"

"No," Wooyoung said in a small voice. "I mean. I don't know."

"Don't forget you were summoned, the same as me," Yunho pointed out. "Does that mean everything you choose is already decided too?" 

That's different, Wooyoung wanted to say. It was different, when desire got involved. How could anyone know what was real, and what wasn't? How could he trust this to be genuine, knowing a part of him must've wanted this all along? He couldn't. He just couldn't take that risk.

When Wooyoung didn't reply, Yunho just shook his head. "Fine. Whatever," he said, and walked out of the room, head down and eyes too bright.

Yunho was already asleep, or pretending to be, by the time Wooyoung trudged into the barracks. He was disappointed, but also relieved. Not wanting to be alone, Wooyoung crawled into bed next to San, who moved over with a little grunt and then wrapped him up in a hug. "You ok?" San said quietly into his ear, still half-asleep. 

Wooyoung shook his head. "Just go back to sleep."

*

Seonghwa finds Hongjoong in the atrium, sitting with his back against the wall, staring at the glass chamber. Seonghwa sits down beside him and waits.

"Do you think it's true? Do you think he's right?" Hongjoong says at last. "Seonghwa, be honest with me, please. What do you remember, from before?"

"Nothing," Seonghwa says, truthfully. "But... I've heard some of the younger ones talking about having memories, or something like them. I think he could be right." 

Mingi's brother, Yunho's fishing. Even if he hadn't heard it directly from them, San and Wooyoung loved to talk. As for Jongho, whose own file Seonghwa had lovingly and painstakingly constructed from scratch - Jongho had always known things that he shouldn't have known, which couldn't have been explained just from the file.

Seonghwa thought he'd imagined Jongho into existence, just as Hongjoong had imagined himself, but the truth was that they were all bigger than that, larger than any invention. Maybe the truth had been there all along, if they'd only been ready to see it.

"Yeosang told me something else, after you left," Seonghwa says carefully, reaching out to hold Hongjoong's hand. "He remembers what happened before he came here. In Yeosang's world - our world - you disappeared," he says. "You disappeared, and no one knew why. You must've come here."

Alone and lost in this abandoned, empty dimension, with no memory, no recollection. No wonder Hongjoong had been lonely. No wonder he'd summoned them all, one by one - the ones who were as dear to him as brothers, as close as family. 

No wonder they'd searched for each other, inventing each other all over again, to fill in the gaps that were missing.

"So I did this," Hongjoong says bleakly. "I did this to all of you. I brought you here to this terrible place."

"Yes," Seonghwa admits, squeezing his hand. "But now you know, now we know - there's another world that we all came from. Maybe you can also take us back."

*

The others react to the news in different ways. From Wooyoung with relief and hope - to San, unexpectedly, with an explosion of anger.

"We've been taken away from our lives, without any say of our own," San says, slumped alone in a room that's seen the effects of his frustration. There's a mirror smashed on the floor, an overturned chair. He looks more upset than Seonghwa has ever seen him. "And now we don't even know if we'll ever get back to our own world? That's so messed up." 

Even if they do get home, the time will be gone forever, and their memories might never return. It's not fair, and there's nothing Seonghwa can say to make it fair, so he just sits by San in the rubble of the room and says that he's sorry. 

"I guess if we were that important to him and to each other," San says eventually, begrudgingly, "maybe we would've come after him eventually, of our own choice." 

"I think so." Impulsively, Seonghwa hugs him, ruffles up his hair. "Hyung is really glad you're here, for what that's worth."

"Hyung, please," San says in a disgusted voice. But he hugs him back.

Mingi comforts San in his own way. "So you know what this means, right?" he says, grinning, elbowing San in the ribs. "You missed me that much, right? Couldn't bear to live without me. Had to bring me here just to keep you company."

"Lies," San says instantly, trying not to smile but the side of his mouth twitching nonetheless. "I summoned you purely for the piggybacks."

Yunho is quieter than Wooyoung, but it's like a similar weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He's smiling a lot more and the two of them have started holding hands when they think no one's looking.

Jongho is Jongho. "So... the Captain brought us to this hell dimension by accident." His expression is unreadable.

"I mean." Seonghwa pauses. "It's not quite a _hell_ dimension."

Jongho tapped his chin. "Alright," he says, as though he's made up his mind. He cracks his knuckles, flexes his arms. "Seems like it was a bad idea but I guess he's gonna need our help to get out of it."

Hongjoong is the most subdued of all. Blaming himself, he throws himself into his work more than ever, tiring himself out, barely sleeping.

"You know, I don't regret it," Seonghwa says late at night, when he's once more dragged Hongjoong to bed and draped himself all over him to make him stay.

"Don't regret what?" Hongjoong whispers. 

"Being here. Having everyone here." Seonghwa kisses the side of Hongjoong's face, hugs him tighter so he can't escape. "Being with you."

Hongjoong doesn't reply. But he twines their hands together, and he doesn't let go.

*

"I asked Yeosang about us."

Yunho tenses up, hands stilling. But he doesn't turn around. "Oh?" he says, forcing himself to take a deep breath and keep tending to Seonghwa's garden. They'll all have to be repotted to be taken on the journey, so he's starting the task now.

Footsteps crunch across the gravel, and then Wooyoung is kneeling down beside him. Silently Yunho hands him a pot and a spade, and for a little while they just work. 

When the plants are done for now and he's set his gloves aside, Yunho finally looks up. Wooyoung has a smudge of dirt on his cheekbone, and his hands are a mess because he didn't bother to put gloves on, and he's still so cute that Yunho has to remind himself about how angry he was a few days ago. 

"So I asked Yeosang about us," Wooyoung says again, getting pink in the face under Yunho's scrutiny. "About what we were to each other, back in our own world."

"Yeah?" Yunho swallows.

"He says I liked you," Wooyoung says. "For a long time. I just never - I never had the guts to do anything about it. Ugh," he says, about to cover his face with his hands with embarrassment, and then realising they're dirty and putting them down again, curling them into fists. 

Yunho reaches out, uncurls Wooyoung's fist. "Is this it, then?" he says, his heart thumping too fast. "Is this you doing something about it?"

"You know you don't have to say yes," Wooyoung says. 

"I know," Yunho says, pulling him closer. "That's the whole point. I want to."

He doesn't have any memories of Wooyoung from before, doesn't even have Yeosang's word for whether he liked him back or not. That's okay, he thinks, as he kisses Wooyoung again. They can just start from scratch.

*

Hongjoong's nervous. But he tries not to show it, telling everyone where to stand, what to do, making it sound as though he knows what he's doing.

"Hey," Seonghwa says, catching him by the sleeve as he dashes past. He smiles. "It's going to be okay, you know? Just breathe." 

So maybe he's not at good at hiding it as he thought. But he takes Seonghwa's advice, like he almost always does, and it does get easier after that. 

When the moment finally comes, when he places the file for the _Illusion_ into the summoning circle by the jetty and casts the spell, blows the herald's trumpet - it's almost anti-climactic. For long minutes, nothing much happens. "Isn't there meant to be a boat?" he hears Jongho say, before someone hushes him. 

Hongjoong anxiously scans the horizon, hoping he'll see _something_. Any minute now, right?

But then they all see it. The water bubbling and churning, the water slapping harder against the harbour wall, the shadow of something huge rising up from beneath the surface. "Damn," he hears Mingi say. "Wasn't expecting that."

The masts come up first, as high as a house is tall, and then the decks and the hull, flanks painted in stripes of blue, water pouring off her sides. In the light of the afternoon sun, she looks golden. She looks beautiful. 

Hongjoong lets out a deep breath of relief as the others start yelling, San and Jongho already running down the jetty and trying to figure out how they'll get aboard. The others follow at a slower pace, but no less eagerly. "Do you think there'll be beds inside?" Yeosang says to Wooyoung, "or just hammocks?"

"Hey, get back here," Seonghwa says, though not very angrily, "you need to help us carry all the supplies on board!" They pay no attention. Seonghwa shrugs and turns back to Hongjoong. "Oh well. The important thing is that you did it," he says, smiling brilliantly. 

"I did," Hongjoong says, still faintly surprised that it's true.Tonight they'll set sail, searching for their own world, and if they can't find that, at least for a place they can call home. 

"I knew you would," Seonghwa says confidently. He takes Hongjoong's hand and they start walking down the jetty together. 

"Come on," San yells, already on the ship, starting to climb the rigging. "Let's go!"

**Author's Note:**

> hey i'm on [twitter](http://twitter.com/kpopliar) and [tumblr](http://popliar.tumblr.com/)


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